Sam Hewitt

THE final Class 31 left running on the national network has retired to the Dartmoor Railway. No. 31452 was put up for sale by Devon & Cornwall Railways, but made its last move on November 27 when it moved light engine from Derby to Okehampton, bringing the curtain down on 60 years of the class on…

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A DRS-owned Class 68 loco has returned to Spain to begin testing with the Mk5a carriages that CAF is building. It is one of a batch that will be hired to TransPennine Express for use on its loco-hauled services later this year on Liverpool to Newcastle services. The TPE-liveried loco left the UK from Portbury…

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THREE quarters of the Class 700 Thameslink fleet had been delivered by the beginning of December, with 85 of the 115 sets ordered in the UK. The mix of eight- and 12-car sets is already transforming Thameslink services, but their arrival has not been without difficulties. Initial deliveries of sets have suffered reliability problems, which…

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THREE new plain line rail grinders have been launched as part of an improvement in preventative track maintenance. They were bought by Network Rail as part of a multi-million pound investment. The three impressive machines have cost £36million, and are the culmination of a procurement process by Network Rail’s route services division that began in…

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OCTOBER saw the new Doncaster iPort freight terminal connected to the national rail network, writes Chris Booth. The 337-acre site is built on part of the former Rossington Colliery and includes new warehouses for Amazon, a 35-acre rail terminal with two sidings capable of handling 775m trains, a run-round loop and container storage. The site…

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GB RAILFREIGHT has objected strongly to new and increased network charges on freight traffic proposed by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), and cast doubt on the organisation’s commitment to developing railfreight. GBRf argues increased charges on commodities such as power station coal and the introduction of new charges for biomass trains will endanger…

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DESPITE its recent turbulent history, there are around 40 surviving steam locos in Colombia. The majority surviving are American-built, along with a selection from various European builders, but two British-built locos survive. Colombia’s railways were built from the 1860s onwards by a variety of private companies and only unified as a national operation in the…

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DUTCH preservationists have brought back to the Netherlands an American-built diesel loco that was involved in the liberation of Europe at the end of the Second World War. The Whitcomb type 65DE19a loco was found by Dutch enthusiasts from the Stoomtrein Goes Borsele (SGB) heritage railway, Netherlands, after several years of research at the Lehigh…

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AUSTRIAN Federal Railways (ÖBB) is rapidly withdrawing its remaining Class 1142 electric locos, replacing them with new Siemens Desiro ML ‘Cityjet’ EMUs. The remaining locos are largely concentrated around the Linz area of western Austria working push-pull regional trains, although they may still be found in use elsewhere in smaller numbers. The loco design was…

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